Easter postcard, early 20th century
24 March 2024
Easter is the name for the Christian celebration of Jesus’s resurrection. The name is an old one, going back to Old English. The root is Germanic and, unsurprisingly, is related to the cardinal direction east. The Proto-Indo-European root is *aus-, meaning to shine, and is a source for many words referring to the dawn, like the Latin aurora and the Greek ηως (eos). But while Easter has a Germanic root, the name only survives in common usage in English and German (Ostern). Other Germanic languages tend to use words based on the post-classical Latin pascha.
Given its religious significance, it should be no surprise that the Old English eastre appears some 375 times in the surviving corpus of texts, which were largely copied by nuns and monks. One example is from the late ninth-century translation of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History. (While he was English, Bede wrote in Latin.) In a passage about Abbot Ceolfrith’s mission to King Naitan of the Picts, the translation says:
Sende him crætige wyrhtan stænene cyricean to tibrianne; sende him eac stafas & gewrit be gehealde rihtra Eastrana & be Godes þeowa sceare, eac oðrum rihtum Godes cyricean.
(He sent him skilled workers to build a stone church; he also sent him letters and writings about the observance of the correct [date of] Easter & about the tonsure of God’s servants, and other rules of God’s church.)
Bede’s history is very much preoccupied, one might say obsessed, with telling how the Celtic church was converted to Roman Catholicism, with the date of Easter being the prime indicator of that conversion.
In another work, Bede gives an origin for the word Easter, one that is often cited to this day despite there being little evidence to support it. In his De temporum ratione (About the Reckoning of Time), written in the early eighth century, Bede says in a passage explaining the names of the months:
Eostur-monath, qui nunc paschalis mensis interpretatur, quondam a dea illorum quae Eostre vocabatur, et cui in illo festa celebrabant, nomen habuit, a cujus nomine nunc paschale tempus cognominant, consueto antiquae observationis vocabulo gaudia novae solemnitatis vocantes.
(Eostur-monath has a name which is now translated as paschal month, which was once named after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, and in whose name they held and celebrated feasts. Now they call the paschal season by her name, calling the joys of the new ritual by the traditional name of the ancient observance.)
The Christian church repurposing pagan celebrations to correspond with Christian holidays was, however, a common occurrence, so Bede’s explanation is plausible on its face. But there is no other evidence for the existence of such a goddess; all we have is Bede’s word for it, and Bede is not exactly what one might call a reliable narrator. So, a more parsimonious explanation would be that the Old English name was originally a reference to the vernal equinox and its corresponding celebrations, eliminating the goddess from the equation. After all, the equinoxes are the dates when the sun rises closest to true east.
The other common term for Easter is pasch, which in English is more usually found in its adjectival form paschal. English use of this word also dates to Old English. It’s a borrowing from the Latin pascha, which in later centuries was reinforced by the influence of the Anglo-Norman pasche, and in Scotland and the north of England by the Old Danish paska. Ultimately, the word comes from the Hebrew pesah, meaning Passover, that holiday being celebrated at roughly the same time as Easter.
English use of pasch dates to at least the early eleventh century, when it appears in Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion, an astronomical and calendrical text. Byrhtferth uses the word to refer to the Jewish holiday:
Pasca ys Ebreisc nama, and he getacnað oferfæreld.
(Pasch is a Hebrew name, and it signifies passover.)
And to the Christian one:
He abæd æt þam mihtigan Drihtne mid eallum his munucheape þæt he him mildelice gecydde hwær hyt rihtlicost wære þæt man þa Easterlican tide mid Godes rihte, þæne Pascan, healdan sceolde.
(He prayed to the mighty Lord with all his assembly of monks that he might graciously make known to him where one should most properly according to God’s law, hold the Pasch, the Easter season.)
Eostre is not the only mythical being associated with the holiday; there is the Easter bunny. The bunny was originally a hare, and the tradition started in Germany as the Osterhase. The first reference to the tradition in English that I’m aware of is from Charles Dickens’s Household Words of 7 June 1851:
Children were celebrating Good Friday by buying sugar lambs, which held little crimson and gold banners between their little fore-legs, as they lay innocently reposing upon green sugar banks. Many also were the sugar hares, Easter hares—those fabulous creatures so dear to German children—which were also bought, though, properly Easter had not yet arrived. But the hares and their gay crimson eggs had arrived days and days before.
German immigrants brought the tradition to the United States, and in the process the hare became a rabbit or bunny. The first reference to the Easter bunny that I know of is in a short poem published in the Detroit Free Press of 5 April 1897. The poem is reprinted from the Indianapolis Journal, but I cannot locate it in that paper:
Already do the windows show
The joyous Easter bunny,
And Maud on bonnets new doth blow
Great wads of Easter money.
To sum up, the name Easter was originally a reference to the vernal equinox, and pasch to the Jewish Passover. The story of the goddess Eostre, while plausible, is supported by only the thinnest of evidence and more likely arises out of a misunderstanding of pagan religious practices by Bede and other early medieval, Christian scholars.
Sources:
American Heritage Dictionary Indo-European Roots Appendix. s.v. aus-.
Baker, Peter and Michael Lapidge. Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion. Early English Text Society (EETS), S.S. 15. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995, 3.1, 122–23; 3.2, 138–39.
Davies, Mark. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Accessed 31 July 2020.
Dictionary of Old English: A to I. Toronto: U of Toronto, 2018, s.v. eastre.
Miller, Thomas. The Old English Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, part 1.2. Early English Text Society (EETS), O.S. 96. London: Oxford UP, 1891, 5.19, 469–70.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2011, s.v. Easter, n.1; June 2005, s.v. pasch, n.
Wallis, Faith. Bede: The Reckoning of Time. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2004, 54.